Monetizing image hosting and image search

The single biggest source of user generated content is images, far ahead of text blogs and video. Image hosting is one area where a proper business model for monetization is yet to emerge. The problems with images are, you don’t have a reference to provide contextual ads !! That could all change with some tools like “riya” which offers image/text/photo recognition software. If one were to able to accurately identify some of the content appearing on images , then contextual ads can be delivered for all of those pages. Had talked about improving image search using some kind of an image ranking algorithm which would create a database of known images , which is searchable. This could be used as a reference for generating contextual advertisement on photo hosting sites.

Put this into context with what Riya palling on doing in image search

"And, we have been a search engine the whole time. We are better at finding people, and our [searching] is growing faster than uploading. You will see us do more crawling and searching of public images in addition to what is uploaded."

Riya is building a new type of photo search engine, one that finds similarities among images. "Riya started with facial recognition, but we will deliver public image search and do similarity, such as finding images similar to your location or girl friend," Shah said. "Click on any photo of any person and get similar results. You could have a picture of a car and find things that look like cars."

This in my opinion is a great opportunity, one which the likes of Google, Yahoo, MSN cannot ignore for long.

Tags: Image Search, Search, Riya